"What now?" [Ep 009]

You just spent two years of your life dedicated to this book and blew the launch out of the water. So what now?

Today we're going to be going to four different podcasts to talk about what's next for the brand and beyond. Thank you. Can I have a piece of gum? Oh, it's your last one. I'm not going to do that to you. No, no. I will never take a man's last piece of gum. No. It's crude and unusual. Thank you. Hello. The last piece is always a holy piece. I would have done this with him and, like, split it. Lady in the trampsaw, my man. Yeah. Let's rock.

Your wedding ring is rubber.

Yeah. The other ring, it would, like. It would get a little tight while I was sleeping, and I would end up taking it off while I'm asleep, and I'd be like, where is it?

Mark, you are ridiculously good at writing instruction manuals for how to make money. But if people don't know how to think and they've got a life structure that doesn't make any sense, and they're wasting time on, you know, social media or even just a friend group that is going nowhere fast, what advice do you have for them to get back on track?

One of my favorite quotes from B.F. skinner, who was a behavior psychologist from way back in the day, was, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. He said, well, if you bleed it out enough and you starve it and you leave it in the sun and you put the water right in front of its mouth, he's like, I can veritably guarantee that I can make it drink. And so if you were to think about yourself as that horse, then it's like, okay, well, what is the equivalent of the bloodletting, the dehydration, the starving that you can put yourself into, get the behavior you want. So starving has a negative connotation, but we can also starve out the negative things in your life. Like, you can starve the alcohol, you can starve the friends. And I think the easiest way to do that is to get out of the environment you're in. I think this was in Atomic Habits in Vietnam. I think it was like 10% of troops or something were taking heroin when they were over there in the 70s, and they thought there was going to be this massive problem when they came back to the States. But when they came back to the States, almost no one continued the heroin habit. And so going from Vietnam, where you're doing Heroin, to the US where you're not taking heroin had a 90% success rate, whereas the inverse is true of recovery centers in the United States. Today. People go there and 90% of them relapse when they go back home. And so the difference is that people were doing heroin in a different environment, and then they changed their environment, and then they never went back to the environment that they did heroin in. To be fair, I think the reason a lot of people kind of like some of the content that I put out from a money making perspective is how can I operationalize this word, right? So like patience, for example, is one that people throw out a lot. But for me, defining patience was helpful, which is figuring out what to do in the meantime. Like, that's patience. Like, we're like, I'm not patient. It's like, no, you just need to figure out what to do in the meantime. I think these are like mental models around using emotions to fuel the behaviors that you want. So me defining amorphous terms like confidence, winning, respect, loyalty, sadness, anxiety, have come from my own desire to understand the words and reading the dictionary definitions and feeling like they don't provide much and they can't help me. What is love? And you know, people are like, it's a feeling that that doesn't help me. How do I operationalize this word love for me? How much are you willing to sacrifice to maintain a relationship? That is how you can measure love. You could use an example of like, man, that guy works on that piece of crap car all the time. He must really love it, right? Like, he's willing to sacrifice a lot to maintain that thing. To the same degree, many people would sacrifice everything for their kids. Now there's plenty of times where they don't like their kids, but they'd be willing to die for their children. You might be willing to die for your country. And so when I define these terms, it has been out of my own self interest to learn how to navigate life better.

You just did a book launch. It was unreal. I mean, really like blew people's minds, set a standard or what did you demonstrate in the way that you did that that other people don't understand?

With each book, I wanted to demonstrate the concept of the book with the book itself. Since the concept of the book was to advertise and to get lots of leads, then I thought it would be appropriate to advertise and get lots of leads. And I used every method in the book I ran ads for. Even though I didn't need to run ads, we still got 137,000 people from ads. We had affiliates. We got 104,000 people there from affiliates. We had 27,000 affiliates promote the book. We had customer referrals. People sent their friends there. So I had an incentive that if you just get 10 people to come, you'll get two bonus chapters that aren't released with the book. And so, you know, the next book, I'll try and continue that meta theme of, I have concepts in this book and I will show you that they work because I will use them to market and promote the book.

Tell me, on the no strip, it says, be one of zero. What does that mean?

So one of zero is a brand that I am really passionate about the concept. 1 of 0 actually came from my media team. We talk about content in general as one of one content. We try to make content that only we can make. And that's actually one of my big marketing rules, is that say what only you can say, show what only you can show. As we were approaching the event, the team learned more and more about what we were gonna be giving away and how much we were putting into it. And they're like, dude, this isn't even one of one. This is one of zero. And that statement just clicked. And then everyone latched onto it because it wasn't about just doing what only we could do. It was doing what no one else would do. You look at one of zero, one divided by zero from a mathematical perspective, it's undefined. And I think a lot of that is stuff that I resonate with, which is doing work that no one else will do is doing the things that other people will tell you not to do. And foregoing the shoulds and the musts and the have to's that people around you tell you to do because they want to project their life and their expectations on yours. But you want to live in direct contrast to that because you want to be your own person and be beyond definition and let your actions be the only thing that define you. One of one is doing things that only you can do, but one of zero is doing things that you're not even sure you can do yet. Appreciate you, man. Chick Fil A action. What is the Chick Fil A order? I go 12 count grilled nugs, 4 count fried tenders, and then a spicy chicken deluxe no cheese with chick Fil A sauce and ranch. That's the go to. If you can only choose between one sauce out of every restaurant, it would be no, it would be Mostagh Yar, the Persian yogurt sauce. Go with the roots. Yeah. I mean, it also has nutritional value. It's yogurt. It's got protein in it. Right. Little fat. It's refreshing. What's the sign of a good podcast interview for you? Number one is my rapport with the host. If we're comfortable, then automatically the conversation is going to be better. The second thing is how much they know about me and our stuff. If I'm doing, like, recaps, it's less interesting. If I were to do a third and fourth thing, it is quality of the follow on questions. Because there are some people who have, like, these are 12 questions that I will ask Alex. They ask a question, I answer the question, then they say question two. And then they don't dive deeper into it, which to me almost makes it seem like they're not listening, because then it's not a conversation. It's really just like 12 short clips. The last one is really their ability to let silence exist. I will say that I have noticed this about the best podcast hosts is that, like, they will ask a question and then I might answer, and they will just sit at the end of that and then give me another second or two, and then I might add something to it that might be the real nugget or crystallization of thinking. And if you have a really rushed cadence in terms of how the conversation is going, it becomes more difficult to have thoughtful responses. Oh, wow. What's up, stud? How's it going, man? Good to see you, man. What have you learned in the last year? The hardest work I have done has been my redefining winning. I think for me, that is, like, that has been my big unlock for how much effort I could put in to make better and keep pushing. So I think one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur or just as an individual is shifting how you define winning for yourself. And it's easy to say it and say, of course I'm in the game, I'm winning. It's much harder to actually believe that. And so it's easy to make the Instagram clip, but it's hard to live it. And what's been interesting for me is that I feel like it's unlocked a different level of work ethic. I thought that the fear of the gun to your head was still the strongest motivator, and it is in the short term. But if you need to run a marathon, then you need to have something that is going to sustain for a longer period of time. Like, punishment is always stronger. The short term reward is always Longer in the long term. And so we have to redefine how we reward ourselves for the work we do. And so since I don't believe in legacy, and I don't believe that in 5,000 years people are going to remember who I am, I had to make winning working as hard as I could on something. How do you measure working as hard as you can? Tough. I think about a future version of myself who has all the context of my current situation, my skills, the information available to me, the resources I have. And that man, that future man, knows what perfect work looks like, which is how much effort can I put into this thing and not be distracted and continue to chisel away at this project? It's very hard because it means there's very few projects that I can do if I. If I have that level of work as my new standard. And so if that level of work is the standard, and that is what winning is, then I can only do it for a few things. There's just a lot of things I'm not going to be able to do, which is sad in some ways, but I think a necessary trade off. Because, like, we have one human life hair band, no strip ready. I tested a zillion different bags. To get the bag that I have, I wear one pair of shorts and one beater. If I want to conserve space, I can do two to one. So I can do two beaters per one pair of shorts. I can wear shorts twice. I know I'm risque like that. I bring no strips, and I usually have one flannel or button down that I bring with me. And I wear the same shoes that are appropriate in all venues. I can wear them in the gym. I can wear them to a restaurant. I can wear them on stage. That makes packing take less than a minute for me. And that's how I like it. And so I can pretty much work until the moment we have to leave. And I just throw my two beaters in and my shorts and I'm good to go. The first time you put them on, you're like, this is not gonna make it better. If you ever have breathing problems, whenever you've got, like a good line of. Of air, you're like, don't fuck with it, you know, like, just let it go. So you go here to just destroy all of the good stuff. And then you take your first breath and you're like, I didn't know I could breathe so well. I didn't know the air could be so sweet. The studs, what's up man. What up, council?

We need to do something about billionaires.

I am proposing that the city of Los Angeles ban billionaires from the beach. What do you think is the biggest mistake content creators make today? Not being them. Basically getting taken over by the algorithm and then like, talking about blue trees when they don't actually fuck with blue trees. Right? But they did it because they did one blue tree post, and people, right, had to. And so they got a lot of likes, and they're like, maybe I'll start making more stuff on blue trees. But, like, then they go down that alleyway for six months or a year, and then they're like, oh, I'm like the Blue Tree Channel. But, like, I don't even care about trees. Like, that's not even the stuff I like talking about. And so they can't actually sustain it because the biggest brands are built over decades, not days or weeks or months. A secret confession. The majority of my newsfeed, almost all of it, is comedians, and that's because I like comedy. And I think comedy and philosophy are probably my two great interests in terms of the things that I consume, because they are the two. The two truth tellers of society as philosophers and comedians. I love what they do. And I also think, like, what more philanthropic line of work can you have than to just bring joy to people? I think that's really cool. And I have a lot of admiration for the craft, and so I'd like to do more stuff in that arena if the comedic world will have me. As of this morning, both $100 million offers and $100 million leads are on Amazon charts. So top 20 books on all Amazon. We have two of them. We beat Harry Potter. Take that, jk. I'm kidding. You're amazing, and I'm a huge fan of your work. I would say American chicken and rice is like, meh. That's why you got to go off the sword. Got to go Middle Eastern style. Some juju kebab. If you know, you know. Hello. Hello. How are you, bro? Good, man. You need to get back in the gym. I know. I cleaned out a little bit.

The challenge for you is going to be you continuing to grow and experience and dig deeper into not becoming a repetitive. Like, everybody in this space.

Yeah, you know exactly what I mean. Because you are the best right now.

And you've taken that title. It took you a while. You were like a rising dude coming up from, like, he's going to do it.

He's going to do it. He's going to do it. Now you've done it.

And by the way, when I talk to other people, this is kind of a consensus. It's not like I'm giving you some compliment. No one else has told you. I think you're the best right now.

Thanks.

And I say right now because that's.

Not a title that you got to keep long term.

You got to keep arguing and fighting for it and scratching. But you're the best right now.

You just spent two years of your life dedicated to this book. You spent six hours every day writing it and blew the launch out of the water. So what now?

More better. We will do more of what we were doing before. We'll do it better. I do have my project, you know, One of Zero, that I'm working on in the background. At the same time, I still have my third book, and I think a lot of. A lot of people are going to make a lot of money from it, which I'm very excited about. And we'll, you know, get more companies in acquisition.com. but I have. I have two big projects that I'm working on. One is the third book, the other is one of zero, and those are kind of the two big projects that I have for the next two years.